URL Structure for Product Pages
-
Hi Moz Community.
I'm in need of some URL structure advice for product pages. We currently have ~4,000+ products and I'm trying to determine whether I need a new URL structure from the previous site owners. There are two current product URL structures that exist in our website:
1.http://www.example.com/bracelets/gold-bracelets/1-1-10-ct-diamond-tw-slip-on-bangle-14k-pink-gold-gh-i1-i2/ (old URL structure)
2. http://www.example.com/gemstone-bracelet-prd-bcy-121189/ (new URL structure)The problem is that half of our products are still in the old structure (no one moved them forward), but at the same time I'm not sure if the new structure is optimized as much as possible. Every single gemstone bracelet, or whatever product will have the same url structure, only being unique with the product number at the end.
Would it be better to change everything over to more product specific URLS. I.e. example.com/topaz-gemstone-dangle-bracelet.
Thanks for your help!
-Reed -
Thanks for your help.
-
Hello again Reed,
Thats exactly how I would recommend doing it. I should have mentioned canonicalization in my first response because you will probably have each product in multiple categories.
-
Hi Barry,
Thanks for the response. That leads me to give you more examples...
Let's say we have a heart-shaped pendant/locket product. This product would now have three different URLs for each of the appropriate categories...
1. example.com/pendants/hearts/gold-heart-locket-12345
2. example.com/pendants/lockets/gold-heart-locket-12345
3. example.com/gold-heart-locket-12345 (our current platform always puts a rel="canonical" to the URL with no sub-directories, which tends to be the ranked URL every time)Would it be best to keep up with this practice of canonicalization for one preferred product pushed into multiple categories? Still using the above method of URL organization you just gave me of course.
-
Hello Reed,
I think the best thing to start with would be organizing your products into categories that both bots and humans can semantically understand that will eventually lead to the actual urls you will use. What I mean is it would be better to have some form of:
example.com/bracelets/dangle-topaz-gemstone
example.com/topaz-gemstone-dangle-bracelet
example.com/dangle-bracelets/topaz-gemstone
It would be best to not go past the 3rd level if you can help it but if you have over 4,000 products it might be hard. When I did this for a company I found that the more time I spent on the organizational structure of the products, the better and more organized the URLs ended up.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
Sorry Posting it again. How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Pros and Cons of Rel Author on Product Pages
I've heard that having rel=author enabled on your pages can be great for increasing click through rate but you should not use it on every page on your site. What are the pros and cons of using rel=author on product pages? Do you use rel=author on your product pages or just on your blog articles?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe1 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Optimal Structure for Forum Thread URL
For getting forum threads ranked, which is best and why? site.com**/topic/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/t/**thread-title-goes-here site.com**/**thread-title-goes-here I'd take comfort in knowing that SEOmoz uses the middle version, except that "q" is more meaningful to a human than "t". The last option seems like the best bet overall, except that users could potentially steal urls that I may want to use in the future. My old structure was site.com/forum/topic/TOPIC_ID-thread-title-goes-here so obviously any of those would be a vast improvement, but I might as well make the best choice now so I only have to change once.
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Why am i still getting duplicate page title warnings after implementing canonical URLS?
Hi there, i'm having some trouble understanding why I'm still getting duplicate page title warnings on pages that have the rel=canonical attribute. For example: this page is the relative url http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/1 and http://www.resnet.us/directory/auditor/az/89/home-energy-raters-hers-raters/2 is the second page of this parsed list which is linking back to the first page using rel=canonical. i have over 300 pages like this!! what should i do SEOmoz GURUS? how do i remedy this problem? is it a problem?
Technical SEO | | fourthdimensioninc0 -
New URL structure caused a HUGE drop?
I have started working with a client who did an upgrade on their e-commerce sive in May of last year. It totally changed the URL structure and they didn't redirect old URLs or do any of the things they should have. Not unexpectedly they they went from about 300 visitors a day to 0 for then rose up to maybe 50 and have remained there ever since. There were some major onsite issues including about 15000 internal links that 302 back to the site. In any case I have fixed most of the onsite problems and worked on a little better categorization + content optimization, etc. We have only been working on this for about 30 days and organic traffic is up and they are ranking for much better keywords, but I expected a little quicker rise. Here is a screenshot out of GA of their descent. Its pretty rapid. I dont think it makes sense to redirect their old URLs at this point since most of them have been deindexed for 10+ months. Anyone have any suggestions on how to get back to their previous level. The domain actually has decent authority and link profile, etc. Is this just going to be a slow climb back? Any thoughts? Fxz9Y.png
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0